Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Monday, March 21, 2016

"I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated": A Recap of No Pasarán's Che Guevara Posts

Reader, if
perchance you don't understand some people's opposition to this most
romantic of revolutionaries — if indeed you find it baffling — you might want to peruse through some
of the following thoughts on Che Guevara:

…The
future T-shirt icon … proclaimed to the press that his ideal societal
model was Kim Il-Sung's North Korea. … Guevara traveled there in 1965,
saw the brutality and poverty with his own eyes, and then made it his
goal to import that system to Latin America. As a champion of the poor,
Che aspired to emulate a society that truly benefits its poorest
inhabitants -anyone not named Kim Jong-il or Kim Il-Sung. … Leftists
always have a problem with U.S.-backed dictatorships, but never with
Stalinist and Maoist stooges like — well, like Che Guevara. (Benjamin Duffy)

There
is a misperception that [Ernesto "Che" Guevara] was a free spirit. He
had cold Stalinist personality. He used to sign his early
correspondence "Stalin II." He said early on that he saw the solution
to all the world's problems behind (the) Iron Curtain. But this was not
some hippie dippie Marxist, Guevara said in speech in 1962 that he
regarded the very spirit of rebellion as anti-revolutionary. Figure
that out, he said individualism must disappear in Cuba. If you tried to
do your own thing under his regime you wound up in a prison camp. (Humberto Fontova)

Who is the writer of that claim? A capitalist reactionary? An imperialist? A (neo-)fascist? A Batista ally? No. Gustavo Arcos Bergnes is Castro's fellow revolutionary, imprisoned with the future Líder Maximo in the mid-1950s. And he experienced Castro both as a fellow cell-mate and (twice) as a warden. Castro's violent revolutionaries of the 1950s were treated far more humanely by the dictator Batista than non-violent human rights activists are treated by Castro
today, he says as he recalls getting special treatment (hospital rooms
as cells, private cooking facilities, etc) and pardons after only 21
months. (Since Castro's coming to power, incidentally, there have been 20,000 summary executions, but — unlike Pinochet's 3,000 victims — these are not of any particular concern to "human rights activists")

Che
Guevara was one of the regime’s chief executioners during this period
and is said to have acknowledged ordering "several thousand"
executions. All took place without affording the victims fair trials
and due process of law.

In
1956, when Che linked up with the Cuban exiles in Mexico city, one of
them recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as
"Fascists!" and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks. (Humberto Fontava)

Nearly four decades after his death, the legend of Che Guevara has grown worldwide. In this new book, Alvaro Vargas Llosa separates the myth from the reality of Che's legacy, and shows that Che's
ideals were a re-hash of notions about centralized power that have
long been the major source of suffering and misery in the
underdeveloped world. With testimonies from witnesses of Che's actions, Alvaro Vargas Llosa's detailed account of the "real Che" sets the record straight by exposing the delusion at the heart of the Che phenomenon. Vargas Llosa shows that Che's
legacy—making the law subservient to the most powerful, crushing any
and all dissent, and concentrating wealth under the guise of "social
equality"—is not the solution to poverty and injustice but is the core
of the problem.

The
cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of
our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster.
Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic
or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a
mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che
presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded
Cuba's "labor camp" system …
In the famous essay in which he
issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke
about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases:
"Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy,
which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him
into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing
machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. (Paul Berman on The Cult of Che)

• Ireland to erect monument to Che Guevara
One
can imagine many places wanting to build a monument to El Che, but why
would precisely Ireland step in to do that? Because Ernesto Guevara had
an Irish ancestor, born in Galway in 1715 (and appropriately, perhaps,
named Lynch).